I Told You So: Preparing for the next Ice Age.

I was on this story several weeks ago, but it seems that the rest of the world is actually catching up with me. Today, Canada's National Post published an opinion piece that stated pretty much exactly the same things I've been saying for weeks.

Here are some facts presented in the article:

• Snow cover over North America, Siberia, Mongolia, and China -- also read as 'most of the Northern Hemisphere' -- is greater than it's been in 40 years.
• The U.S. National Climatic Data Center show that temperatures in January were cooler than the 1901-2000 average.
• China is suffering from the most brutal winter it's seen in a century.
• There was more snow in the first two weeks of February in Toronto (70 cm) than there'd been in the entire previous record for the month, which was set back in 1950 (66.6 cm).
• The Arctic Sea ice is back and it's thicker -- by 10 to 20 cm -- than it was last year.

Last month, Oleg Sorokhtin of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences advised folks to 'stock up on fur coats'.

Kenneth Tapping of Canada's National Reseach Council is convinced we're in for a long period of severe cold if sunspot activity doesn't pick up soon, pointing out that the last time the sun was this inactive, the earth went through a several century long 'Little Ice Age'.

And, on top of all of that, according to Marc Morano of the U.S. Senate's Committe on Environment and Public Works, we're looking at global "temperatures just sort of 'plateau-ing out' to the point where the head of the U.N. IPCC [Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change] has recently called for an investigation as to why temperatures were not continuing to rise as predicted."

And, these aren't the only places that are echoing me, either. Selwyn Duke, over at the John Birch Society, is saying it, too. The Federalist Journal is also saying it.

( Oh, and there's this quiet little story that's being ignored by the mainstream media that the National Oceanographic and Atmopheric Administration that debunked one of the main premises of Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth. )

And, to top it all off, four different sources -- UK's Hadley Climate Research Unit, NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, the University of Alabama, Huntsville, and the Remote Sensing Systems of Santa Rosa, CA -- state that we've gotten 'globally cooler' in the past 12 months (by an average of -.64°C).

The London Telegraph even caught on, saying:

More thought-provoking, however, has been the scientific data showing just how abnormal this winter's cooling has been. According to Nasa's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, we experienced the sharpest January-to-January global temperature drop - three quarters of a degree Celsius - since records began in 1880.

Temperatures were lower than their 20th century average for the first time since 1982. Snow cover in the northern hemisphere was at its greatest extent since 1966. At the other end of the world, Antarctic ice-cover was at its most extensive since satellite records began in 1979, 30 per cent above the January average ...

It may be too early to draw conclusions as to what this says about changing climate patterns, but the fact remains that such drastic cooling hardly accords with classic global warming theory, that rising CO2 must mean rising temperatures. Certainly nothing on this scale was predicted by those scientific bodies on which the world's politicians have been relying for their belief that global warming was the most serious challenge facing the planet.

At New Year, one such body, the University of East Anglia's Hadley Centre, predicted that, although 2008 would be cooler than some recent years, it would still be one of the 10 hottest years in history, and that any cooling would only "mask the underlying warming trend".

Seven weeks later it is clear that the cooling has gone much further than that, according better with the predictions of that growing body of scientists who argue that climate change is caused less by CO2 emissions than by magnetic activity on the Sun. They point to the abnormally low present sunspot level, of a type associated with severe cooling in the past, such as in the Little Ice Age between the 17th and early 19th centuries.

Meanwhile, rather than actually engaging in a debate about facts -- because at least, by their dogma, the debate is 'settled' and there's no need for further or continued review -- folks like The Nation's David Roberts resort to name-calling ...